Abortion stigma, class and embodiment in neoliberal England

Abstract

Research on abortion stigma has given insight into how women experience abortion, tell stories about abortion, and make decisions about abortion. Stigma encompasses a range of feelings, experiences and discourses that can make having an abortion a negative experience or one that women might wish to conceal. This paper explores how abortion stigma is both classed and embodied, using the life stories of 15 middle-class women who have had abortions in England in ‘neoliberal times’. It argues that the women’s class position gave them access to various discursive resources with which to articulate their abortion stories, shaping their experiences and narration of stigma. It also draws attention to the ways in which both class and stigma are ‘made through marking’ on the body, and thus to the under-theorised embodied aspects of abortion stigma. In doing so, it argues that abortion stigma acts as a regulatory ‘technology of the self’ that is enabled by middle-class practices of self-control.

Keywords:

• Abortion
• stigma
• class
• embodiment

Notes

Acknowledgements

Thank you to participants whose stories form the basis of this paper. I am also grateful for the comments and suggestions of the reviewers at Culture, Health & Sexuality, and for the advice of colleagues and friends Shadreck Mwale, Sarah Leaney, Alison Phipps and Gareth Thomas who read drafts of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Abortions beyond 24 weeks are permitted to preserve the life of the pregnant person, or in the case of fatal foetal abnormality. Provision varies by region e.g. abortions above 18 weeks are difficult to access in Scotland (Purcell et al. 2017), and abortion was illegal in Northern Ireland until October 2019 when it was decriminalised.

2 Defined for the purposes of this paper as possessing high levels of social and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1984); see ‘Methodology’, below.

3 ‘Felt’ stigma was first coined by Scambler and Hopkins in their work on epilepsy (1986). ‘Internalisation’ has been used for decades in work on stigmatised identities (e.g. Weinberg 1972, on internalised homophobia). The typology of enacted/felt/internalised is now common in work on stigma (see Herek 2009).

4 The British Pregnancy Advisory Service (bpas) is an abortion provider that provided permission to advertise the study in two of their clinics.

5 Early medical abortion, usually defined as 9 weeks’ gestation or below, is an increasingly common method in the UK (Department of Health 2017). It is typically described as feeling like a very heavy period, and is often accompanied by side-effects including nausea, vomiting, fever and diarrhoea (Purcell et al. 2017).

6 Total number of abortions (20) exceeds total number of participants (15) because some participants had more than one abortion.

7 For a ‘medical’ abortion, medication is administered and the foetal tissue is passed vaginally. ‘Surgical’ abortion is the term used for procedures that involve a doctor softening the cervix and removing the pregnancy tissue with surgical tools. This is usually done under sedation. Which procedure is offered is based on a number of factors including gestational age and the preference of the pregnant person.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council under grant 1363862.